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Crock, 1/2/20

As a Buffalo native, it’s a constant source of both amusement and mild irritation to discover that many, many people don’t know that Buffalo wings are called that because they were first invented at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, a mere 15-minute walk from where my father lives today! Very few people are so misguided as to make the Jessica Simpson-esque mistake of believing they’re actually made from buffalo (the animal), but lots of folks seem to think that the particular type of sauce we associate with Buffalo wings got that name because of some vague association between the power of a rampaging buffalo and the power of, uh, spiciness?

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is: good job, today’s Crock, for getting this basic fact correct. However, that isn’t going to distract me from pointing out all the other problems with this comic, which include, but are not limited to:

• I think the strip’s structure encourages us to read more into the implied metaphor than it can actually support. I guess it’s supposed to mean “Grossie can’t cook, so having Grossie pack my lunch sucks, just like being a chicken born in Buffalo sucks,” but my brain keeps wanting to make it about how she’s, like, fattening him up so she can cook him or something.
• Thanks to the supply chains of modern agriculture, most chickens are born, raised, and slaughtered thousands of miles away from where their remains will eventually be cooked and eaten, and Western New York has no real poultry industry. A chicken born in Buffalo is in fact more likely to live in some hipster’s backyard coop where it will happily live out a relatively long life providing eggs than to end up as wings.
• Buffalo wings have in fact become a staple of bar food across the United States, and so honestly the whole geography question has very little do with it. The plain fact is that the huge majority of chickens born in the world are destined for slaughter, which quite honestly ought to put the whole business of the bologna sandwiches your wife packs for you being subpar in perspective.
• This isn’t directly pertinent to the joke per se, but it’s well established that Maggot digs latrine pits for a living, right? And that’s what he’s standing in, eating his lunch? He’s up to his waist in a latrine pit? Pretty unpleasant, in my opinion.

Anyway, here’s a last Buffalo wing fun fact for you: in Buffalo, we just call them “wings” or “chicken wings”! Interesting, huh?

Six Chix, 1/2/20

I’m excited to see all six of the chix offer their own takes on the Chicken Little mythos one by one, and I gotta say that while I don’t on any level like this joke, I at least recognize that it more or less is a joke, which gives it a leg up on whatever it is that’s going on here. Might we get to a laugh-provoking Chicken-Little-themed punchline by the end of 2020? Dare to dream!

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Funky Winkerbean, 12/3/19

“Hey,” literally nobody asked, “What’s going on with Darrin and Mopey Pete in Funky Winkerbean?” Well, at the doomed comic book publishing venture that they gave up lucrative Hollywood jobs to work at, an artist from the Golden Age of Comics has either been hired in some vague consultant role or is just hanging around the office because he has nowhere to go and nothing better to do (I don’t remember which and if you think I’m going to bother digging through my archives to see if I can figure it out you have wildly overestimated my tolerance for the Comic Book Wankery plots of Funky Winkerbean). Anyway, you want a seasoned professional on your roster for moments like this: when he remembers some long-held grudge against a co-worker who’s almost certainly dead and can’t defend himself, and then just drones on and on all afternoon about what an asshole the guy was.

Crankshaft, 12/3/19

You know, I sort of assume that Crankshaft’s endless malapropism are generated by faulty wiring in his brain, and that he lets loose with them without really thinking about them or even realizing what he’s doing. That’s why I kind of resent the sly smile he’s giving his granddaughter in panel three here. “A ‘napkin,’ get it? What do you think of that one? Just a little something I’m workshopping.”

Six Chix, 12/3/19

Remember Chicken Little, the beloved folk tale protagonist who’s hit in the head with an acorn and believes the sky is falling, convincing his friends of upcoming doom and teaching listeners a valuable lesson about mass hysterias that can arise without much evidence of danger? Well, today’s Six Chix dares to pose the question: what if the sky … were falling? Really makes you think, doesn’t it.

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Dick Tracy, 11/26/19

Oh, wow, a couple of beloved comics characters from a cancelled strip are being revived, in … Dick Tracy, what an extremely surprising development! I won’t deny you the pleasure of taking your own journey through Steve Roper and Mike Nomad’s Wikipedia page, in the course of which you’ll learn that it was originally a wacky Native American minstrelsy strip called Big Chief Wahoo that morphed into a hard-hitting adventure strip starring two white guys, written for decades by Allen and John Saunders, the father-son team who also wrote Mary Worth for most of that stretch. I’ll only note that we seem to be out of the strip’s original continuity — its run ended with Roper and Nomad in their 60s and Roper standing over the grave of his dead wife, who divorced him from an insane asylum and gave birth to a daughter she never told him about — and that Proof Magazine (which does investigative reporting and not, like, articles about geometry, I think) must have a rental insurance premium as high as Woods and Wildlife’s if Steve’s extremely chill reaction to his car getting blown up is any indication.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 11/26/19

I always find it funny when repeated tropes/running gags with some basis in reality just drift further and further from their original germ of truth until they veer into truly nightmarish territory. Like, dogs are territorial animals and sometimes distrust strangers coming onto their turf, which is why they can be aggressive towards postal workers, meter readers, and other outsiders who have reasons to visit hundreds of homes a day; but the form this conflict has taken in the world of Mother Goose and Grimm is that Grimm, a sapient dog who can think in English sentences, hungers for mailman flesh.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/26/19

“They’re all exceptional — in the sense that we had to make exceptions to our policies to hire them, because most of them did very poorly in medical school. Ha! I’m kidding, of course. Fully two-thirds of our patients survive surgeries here, probably you’ll be fine.”

Six Chix, 11/26/19

Oh, this is nice! This lady’s friend is a ballerina and got a high-profile role, so she’s coming out to support her and watch the big performance! If anyone knows what the “joke” in this strip is, I’d love it if you could shoot me an email explaining it to me.